


chicken wire

by netla



Category: Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (TV 2016)
Genre: Gen, Project Blackwing (Dirk Gently), aka dirk's first run in with a fence, the break out
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-22
Updated: 2017-10-22
Packaged: 2019-01-21 13:48:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,594
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12459081
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/netla/pseuds/netla
Summary: The fence is impenetrable.Svlad has tried climbing, jumping, and some very complex and sophisticated scaling, and he’s only earned skinned hands and wobbly legs for his effort. Now he hangs there, taunted by the metal biting into his fingers. He could almost cry. Doomed to be a not-even-that-psychic pincushion for the rest of his life because of three metres of chicken wire.





	chicken wire

The fence is impenetrable. 

Svlad has tried climbing, jumping, and some very complex and sophisticated scaling, and he’s only earned skinned hands and wobbly legs for his effort. Now he hangs there, taunted by the metal biting into his fingers. He could almost cry. Doomed to be a not-even-that-psychic pincushion for the rest of his life because of three metres of chicken wire. 

He bets everyone else has found a conveniently open gate, or bumped into a Project whose ability was to produce wire cutters out of every day household items like slippers and pendulums. They’re merrily skipping to freedom right now while Svlad had to go and listen to the will of the universe. Stupid Svlad never learns his lesson about trusting the universe, even though the universe has been dead keen that Svlad spends the last decade or so of his life in a tiny cell with no windows. It’s so unfair. 

His only option is to ignore the tugging at the base of his spine telling him he needs to be in this exact spot and head back into the chaos playing out on the grounds. Surely out there he could latch on to someone who looks like they know what they’re doing and is willing to take pity on a man who can’t even fight his way past an inanimate object. 

Svlad is practicing exactly what kind of begging face he’ll need to use on his hypothetical saviour when his gut twists. There’s someone watching him. He knows by the tense prickle moving down his arms, and then by the sight of a still figure behind him. The pose of a predator in his element, waiting for his prey to drop its guard.

Svlad’s fingers go slack from shock and he falls, landing hard on his rear. He doesn’t let the pain stop him from scrabbling against ground. It’s Him. The huge guy who attacked him in his room earlier and dragged him to the floor and ate his mind, just before the sirens started screaming and the soldiers started screaming and everything got set on fire.

One quarter of Project Incubus leans casually against a tree, watching Svlad try and fail to conquer the fence. Svlad knows he’s called Project Incubus, because everyone’s been shouting it for the last two hours with varying shades of desperation. Project Incubus started trashing the facility about three minutes after he sucked Svlad’s brain out of his head, and he’s not going to stop until the whole place is ash. When Svlad was running through the trees they’d just dispatched the tanks on them, and Svlad couldn’t even feel bad about it because Project Incubus threw his parapsychologist out the window while the man was just trying to defend him from those four brutes.

It takes a second to register that Project Incubus is wearing the same flimsy white shirt and pants set as Svlad and every other subject he’s seen tonight. If this was a pleasant social interaction in the mandatory exercise and enforced play yard, Svlad would ask where he’d managed to get a special russet-coloured set of slacks. But this is actually a daring and, dare-he-say, thrilling night of escape, and the air around them is punctuated with gunfire and helicopters and sweeping spotlights searching for runaways, so the fact his clothing is red looks pretty bad, if Svlad’s honest. Like, Svlad’s own ensemble is now accessorised with a light spatter of blood from a rough encounter where he ended up between a riot squad and a frizzy haired teenage girl who was very proficient at using a fire extinguisher as a blunt weapon, but he’s not drenched in it. 

It is a little bit terrifying. He cowers against the wire, even though it bites into his skinny back. The man plants his dirty feet in front of Svlad, trapping him. His big hands grip the fence and Project Incubus hangs over Svlad like a very intimidating shop awning. Svlad peeks up at him through his fingers and the moment stretches out miserably as Svlad waits to be finished off properly. This close up he can see that even the white tips of Incubus’s hair have turned red. 

“How old are you?”

Svlad scrunches his face, as thrown by the conversational opener as he would be by a starving lion inquiring about his holiday plans.

“Uh- sixteen, I think.”

The man watches him, unmoved, and Svlad squirms. Project Incubus is taking a long time with this, and Svlad kinda wishes he’d just get on with it.

“How long you been here?”

Maybe he’s desperate for company. Svlad understands that. He’s always longed for someone else to talk to, too. Not a white coat or the shouty men with guns, but someone who really got him and could relate to how he felt. Still, if the man wasn’t so weird and scary, Svlad would definitely tell him he thinks these getting-to-know-you conversations could wait until they’re away from the heavily armed people trying to shove them all back in their cells.

“I don’t know. Forever. Since I was small.”

The big man’s mouth twists down and Svlad is terrified that he’s made him angry, flinching in anticipation of being hauled like a dead antelope back to Incubus’s rabid pack mates. The man hooks a leg over Svlad’s head and Svlad buries his head in his arms, but he’s not being kicked in the face. Instead, Incubus is climbing the fence far more efficiently than Svlad ever could, toes wiggling into the diamond gaps. Svlad gapes up at him and chokes on a yell when the man fists the back of his shirt and drags him to his feet, forcing him up too. 

Svlad climbs as far as he can, the hand twisting the neck of his shirt into a tightly pressured noose, but he’s exhausted and his arms shake with the effort of trying to keep up. He’s hanging there like a dead weight when one calloused hand wraps around his knee and shoves him higher. Svlad whines in disagreement with this action, whines louder when another hand shoves his bottom, and ends on a terminal wail as his face disagrees with the plan of being shoved right into the barbed wire. 

Svlad cuts his hands and his arms and tangles his hair up in the coils as he fights through it, and just when he manages to force open a gap he can wriggle between and starts to think he might make it through this with dignity partially intact, Project Incubus lets him drop. Svlad crashes to the ground with a shout of alarm, ankle twisting and elbows jarring as he hits the dirt. 

It hurts and it’s unpleasant, but, but, but the fence is defeated. There’s only wide empty space ahead of him now. Nothing between him and a new life but miles of forest, dozens of hostile escapees and hundreds of heavily armed search parties, and the burst of happiness in his gut is powerful enough to wipe away hours of humiliation and terror. Svlad is already on his feet, the ineffable thrum of the universe tugging him away from this hellish place, when Project Incubus shouts after him. 

“Little psychic.”

Svlad cringes and turns to where his attacker-turned-assistant is still gripping the fence, watching him through the wire like a fox staring at a hen. Although Svlad is the one with freedom on his side now, so really it should be a hen looking out at a fox. Technically. It just doesn’t actually manage to feel that way. 

“Run. Fast. Don’t stop until you reach a city.” 

Svlad swallows. His throat is dry and it’s only going to get dryer. “City,” he repeats dutifully, if slightly sceptically. He’s not even entirely clear on what makes a city something different from a town or a hamlet or a small motorcade, and like hell is he going to ask now. If a city is where he’s supposed to be, Svlad supposes he’ll just end up in one. 

“Don’t you talk to anyone about this. No names. You’ll only get yourself into trouble.”

Svlad nods maniacally. “City. No talking. Got it.”

“Go.”

Svlad wants to, god does he want to. The universe is calling him already, setting out its whims and plans for the next place Svlad needs to be, and even if it wasn’t, he’s all keyed up on adrenaline that could keep him moving for the next thirty minutes, at least. But. But this man got him over the fence, so-

“Aren’t you coming? You helped me, why are you going back?”

Project Incubus’s eyes are steady and clear. He’s wearing exactly the same uniform all the other human experiments are, yet he looks like he’s never been out of control a day in his life. 

“My boys. We’re getting out of this cage together.” 

Ah. His boys. It sounds nice, and not lonely, and Svlad is almost desperate enough to ask whether he could go with them, now that at least part of Project Incubus has proven itself to be a capable assistant, but before he can voice this stupid, stupid idea, Incubus jumps soundlessly onto the balls of his feet and turns his back on Svlad. 

“Just making sure we got ourselves a tasty snack waiting when we’re done with this place.”

Svlad shivers. Project Incubus tips his head back and howls, and even above the noise of the choppers he can hear three wild answering calls. 

Svlad turns and runs and he doesn’t look back.


End file.
